Issue-oriented hackathons as material participation

Abstract

In recent years, intensive design and development events known as hackathons have become increasingly common. Issue-oriented hackathons are a subset of this trend that bring together ad hoc groups under the auspices of conceiving and prototyping technologies to address social conditions and concerns. In this article, we present ethnographic accounts of a set of issue-oriented hackathons that took place in the United States between 2012 and 2013, in order to explore how these events structure and express emerging forms of participation. Specifically, we propose that issue-oriented hackathons are sites of experimental material participation.